Kids These Days: The Impact of Tech, Social Media and AI on Adolescents

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, in 2022, more than one in three U. S. adolescents between the ages of 18 and 25 had some form of mental health disorder, including anxiety and depression. There’s also a loneliness epidemic: Teens and adults are more connected than ever, yet, somehow, more alone. Kara and three panelists explore how much blame should be placed on technology like smartphones, the impact of social media, whether the adolescent brain is inherently vulnerable, how artificial intelligence might shift the paradigm, and how parents and society at large could mitigate the problem. In this episode: Lauren Greenfield, artist, documentary photographer and filmmaker, who has been chronicling the lives of American adolescents for decades. Most recently, she created and directed Social Studies, an Emmy-nominated five-part docuseries for FX. Matt Richtel, a health and science reporter for the New York Times, who has long covered the social impact of the tech industry. His latest book, How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence, draws on neuroscience and personal narratives to explore the changing complexities of the teen brain and the role technology plays. Jack Thorne, playwright and screenwriter, whose recent Emmy-nominated Netflix hit Adolescence, co-created with Stephen Graham, examines the psychological toll of toxic masculinity, bullying and social media radicalization after a teenage boy kills his female classmate. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, we're going to talk about adolescents and how constant exposure to technology and social media is affecting them, maybe permanently. According to SAMSA, in 2022, more than 1 in 3 U.S. adolescents between 18 and 25 had some sort of mental health disorder, which includes anxiety and depression. There's also a loneliness epidemic. Kids and adults are more connected than ever, but somehow, we are more alone. The question is, how much blame can we place on tech, like smartphones? What about social media? And, most importantly, what can we do about it as adults, as parents, and as a society?

• 0:55Kara Swisher?

  Because we are part of the problem, too. This is one of these issues we talk about on the show a lot. I also talk about it on Pivot a lot, and I'll continue to cover it because I think the impact of social media and tech on us has become amplified, has become weaponized, and it's the most important issue of our day as we seek to create community, and it seeks to pull us apart. My guests today have been looking at this in different ways. Lauren Greenfield is an award-winning artist, documentary photographer, and filmmaker who's been tracking the lives of American adolescents for decades. Most recently, she created and directed an Emmy-nominated five-part docu-series for FX called Social Studies. For about a year, she more or less embedded with a group of teens in California, starting

• 1:39Kara Swisher?

  right after the pandemic, including getting access to the Holy Grail, their phones, and social feeds. It's an eye-opening look inside the relationships with social media and one another. I love this series, and, in fact, we had Lauren on Pivot when it first came out to talk about it. It's a must-watch for any parent. Matt Richtel is an award-winning journalist and author who covers health and science for The New York Times. Richtel has been covering the social impact of tech industry for as long as I've been covering tech. In fact, we often competed with each other. His latest Latest book, How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence, draws on neuroscience and personal narratives to explore the changing complexities of the teen brain and the role that technology plays in that.

• 2:20Kara Swisher?

  And Jack Thorne is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter who has his name on way too many things for me to list off right now. But his recent hit, Adolescence, which aired on Netflix, is a crime drama co-created with Stephen Graham that addresses the psychological toll of toxic masculinity, bullying, and social media radicalization after a teenage boy kills his female classmate. It is an incredibly disturbing show and at the same time, another must-watch and actually done incredibly thoughtfully and very creatively with one-shot cameras throughout the four episodes. It's, you must watch it if you're a parent, you must watch it if you're not a parent. It's been nominated, not surprisingly, for 13 Emmys, including Best Limited Series or Anthology.

• 3:05Kara Swisher?

  This issue isn't going away, of course. In fact, it's getting faster. It's unclear if the new AI companions and chatbots that are growing in popularity will help or exacerbate the mental health crisis. I'm assuming exacerbate. This conversation is real food for thought, so stay with us.

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• 5:30Kara Swisher?

  Lauren, Matt, and Jack, thanks for coming on ON. Thanks for having us.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  Thank you for having us.

• 5:36Kara Swisher?

  All right. So I'm glad to have you all on because you've spent so much time in different ways looking at kids these days and the impact of social media specifically. You're also all parents, and as you know, I have four kids, two in their twenties and two young ones. I wanted you to talk a little bit about how your kids have influenced the way you think about and approach this topic. I have two different situations. The young kids have never been on social media, they're too young. And the older ones, where they're quite in the center of the white-hot beginning of the social media, and both of them are off of social media, which is interesting. Matt, you start, then Jack, and then Lauren.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  First of all, thanks, Cara. It's been a long time, and it's great to see you and talk to you. Watching my kids and their friends has tremendously informed me. In this respect, I've looked at a ton of research and I've seen the universal. And then I've watched them and I've, it's made me realize there's tremendous nuance to this subject because different young people react very differently. And so it forces you, or it forces me to really dig deep and scrutinize what I'm looking at in the research so that I can account for the distinctions among young people I see with my own eyes.

• 6:48Kara Swisher?

  You've taken a science-based approach, we'll get to that in a second. Jack?

• 6:53Speaker 04

  My child is nine, hasn't been on social media at all, so no, wasn't particularly, you know, an example for me to follow more, the fear of the place that he's going was a massive inspiration for me.

• 7:07Kara Swisher?

  And why is that?

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Because I didn't understand it and I wanted to understand it. And, you know, our project started with a question, which is why is there more violence of adolescent boys towards adolescent girls? That was the starting point for all of our thinking and our investigations were particular rather than trying to be general. And I was simply trying to understand someone like Jamie and what Jamie might be consuming.

• 7:33Kara Swisher?

  Lauren?

• 7:34Speaker 06

  Well, social studies was really inspired by seeing a difference in my two kids. One, my youngest was 14 when I started and my eldest was 20. And the 20-year-old was a reader, had like huge focus, was on just to talk to his friends. My youngest was very addicted, we had constant battles over screen time. And during COVID, I started to see real mood swings from being on screens all day. Like he would be ornery and shout at us and there was like a direct relationship that you could see from being on the screens. He ended up really helping me with the project because he knew the language. So he actually ended up really advising me on it.

• 8:17Speaker 06

  I, in the show, we have access to all the kids' phones and we had to figure out the technology to actually get that material. And I hired an engineer to help me and the engineer could figure it out and my son. Ended up hacking the the socials. And I loved in Adolescence, just to Van Girl Jack for a second, the way the detective also has that connection with his son, where he teaches him the language. Like even the, um, in in social studies, we really tried to talk to both teenagers and young people and parents. And so using the language authentically was really important. And so like in the opening sequence, the map is very Snapchat influenced,

• 9:01Speaker 06

  but that's something only young people.

• 9:03Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  Get.

• 9:04Kara Swisher?

  Absolutely.

• 9:05Speaker 06

  So, yeah, just seeing the change and wanting to look at, okay, how is this thing affecting this first generation? That's grown up on it. And I think my younger son was also kind of like that guinea pig generation, where we did just kind of give him a screen because we were busy with the oldest or, you know, we had already done it with one.

• 9:27Kara Swisher?

  Or we didn't know the deleterious effects. Let me just continue with that just for a second. Your docu-series, Social Studies, is a social experiment, and it's Emmy nominated, by the way. Congratulations, as with Adolescence. You've just talked about how you you convince this group of teenagers not to only let them film them and talk about their social media use, but to actually give them access to their phones. Most kids won't even let adults see what's on their screens. When you came on Pivot last year to talk about the series, you told us the timing was right because you started filming just after COVID. Just expand why that was a crucial moment, just a tiny bit more.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  I think it was kind of the perfect, natural experiment because young people were so dependent on it during COVID and their use had shot up. And when they went back to school, they did it with a lot of social anxiety. I, like, I think a lot of parents, thought kids were super eager to get back to school. But actually, what I found is there was so much social anxiety that some kids didn't even want to go back to school. And the use had gone up to eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours a day. But once they went back to school, it didn't go down. Like, they were used to having it be part of every aspect of their lives. And I think they felt like something was wrong, that the isolation was definitely very tangible to them.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  And so I think that's why a lot of them chose to.

• 10:52Speaker 06

  Do this very courageous move of being in the show because it did mean really exposing their social. And by the way, my own son would not let me look at his phone. That was also part of my desire to get in there.

• 11:03Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, my sons show me their phones too much, unfortunately. But Jack, as I mentioned, you and your co-creator Stephen Graham have also racked up a slew of Emmy nominations for this Netflix show, Adolescence. And I thought it was very canny, especially the part where the therapist was talking to Jamie about why he was on social media, even though he was not popular, right? And why he was there lurking and putting up pictures. It was almost cruel, the way she described it, but actually accurate. You said you were initially just aiming to write a show about knife crime. Talk about how it became about social media and specifically incel culture. In The Guardian, you wrote, let me just read this, Jamie is not a simple product of the manosphere. He's a product of parents that

• 11:46Kara Swisher?

  didn't see a school that couldn't care and a brain that didn't stop him. So talk a little bit about this. How did it morph into that?

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think he's, I hope what we were doing in the show was that he's a product of many things. And I hope we're not, what we're not saying is that, and there was one quote in that article that I, I miswrote slightly so that it seemed like I was suggesting that Jamie was solely a product of incel culture, solely a product of the manosphere, which is a very, very complicated and not easy to understand place at the best of times. But when we were writing it, Stephen had this rule that he didn't want to make it about, ah, it's because he had an abusive dad, or ah, it's because he had an alcoholic mum. What we instead arrived at was that there were these sorts of spheres

• 12:34Speaker 04

  of blame. And I was struggling. I couldn't quite find enough that made it compelling for me. And then someone that worked with me, Marila Johnson, said, I think you need to look at incel culture. And as soon as I started looking there, I felt like I had a story that was More interesting. And then I started to build that out, tried to understand it, tried to read as much as I could, tried to lurk as much as I could in unexpected places. And ultimately, found some answers to some things, which I knew if I was consuming at that age, particularly the eighty twenty rule, which is eighty percent of women are a trace of twenty percent of men. If I was consumed at that age, if I was told, you

• 13:19Speaker 04

  are going to have an abnormal life because of the way you look, because of the way you feel about yourself. I, I, I, I feel like it would have taken me down a chaotic path, not the path that Jamie went down, but a chaotic path.

• 13:32Kara Swisher?

  The need for self-esteem and the ability to be liked, which is Instagram makes that instant in a way that's very warping, I think, probably.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes. And isn't solely a response to this moment, and isn't solely a response to the internet, is a response to how Jamie's brain works. And, and is the question that I ask in most situations I'm in still to this day, and I'm forty six, but has done a lot of damage to Jamie. And all these things combined have left his brain almost destroyed by all these different elements, which is why he does such a terrible thing.

• 14:11Kara Swisher?

  Right. So Matt, let's talk about the idea of a brain that didn't stop him, a brain that's been damaged. In your book, How We Grow Up, you push back against the idea championed by Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation and other places, that smartphones and social media are the main cause of adolescent mental health crisis. First, explain why we're calling them adolescents and not teenagers, and then talk about the biological and neurological changes you write about in the book and how you push back against this.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then can I, can I tell Jack what my mother-in-law said about his show?

• 14:40Kara Swisher?

  Sure. Do that first.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  Jack, for all your other successes, you scared the bejesus out of my mother-in-law. And this is will be a segue to what Cara asked me. And she called me up immediately. She said, I must speak to you. Is that real? And this goes to your question, Cara. It's amazingly entertaining and there's some great thoughts in it. But we have become, I think, obsessed by a narrative that's deeply oversimplified. And the way to explain why that is, is to get at what adolescence actually is. It's not the teen years. Those are a specific number of years. Adolescence is the period you enter at puberty, where you go from being cared for by your family

• 15:23Speaker 05

  to eventually caring for yourself and conceivably your offspring, should you have them. Why is this framing important? Over that period, your brain as an adolescent is highly sensitized at the moment of puberty to begin to reconcile all the things your parents taught you. That's the known. And the unknown, that's all the things that are in the world that you have to test and see if they're true. The moment that we're in right now is one with a ton of information, but the device is only part of that. I think everyone on this call would concede that we are in a very complicated world. So when you are consuming and trying to reconcile the known and the unknown in a fast-moving world, it's very difficult.

• 16:08Kara Swisher?

  Meaning the brain doesn't have the ability to do so from a scientific point of view, correct?

• 16:12Speaker 05

  What happens to the brain in this set of circumstances, and it's been growing for some decades, is that you're introduced to a lot of information when your frontal lobe, your prefrontal cortex, is not fully developed. It's tempting to say the phone has created this problem, but I would remind our listeners, and this is so vital, that in the eighties, binge drinking was explosive. Drunk driving injury and death was explosive. Early experimentation with sex was explosive. And at that time, the coping mechanisms were drugs and alcohol. So conceivably, in this time, the device is helping young people to get through this while also intensifying the problems.

• 16:55Kara Swisher?

  All right, that's interesting. And Jack, actually, Jack's show is much more complex. It's not social media. It's gotten written about like that, but that's not the case.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  For sure, for sure.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  I hope you're not saying the show is over.

• 17:05Speaker 05

  No, no, I'm not. I'm saying that my mother-in-law oversimplified your show. I thought your show candidly was, I just couldn't stop watching it.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  This morning, Jack, some friends of my sons were over and I asked them about your show and they said, that's so exciting. We watched snippets of it on TikTok.

• 17:25Kara Swisher?

  So Lauren, as you mentioned, you've been doing projects with adolescents for most of your career. Talk about the changes you've seen in the behavior. As Matt is saying, look, nothing is new under the sun here. It's just a different delivery mechanism. Is that true?

• 17:37Speaker 06

  I mean, I think in terms of what Matt was talking about, social studies is really about coming of age in the time of social media.

• 17:44Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 17:45Speaker 06

  And we see how it's affected every aspect of growing up. I mean, I started looking at youth culture and girl culture in the 90s and 2000s. And I feel like I grew up and was a teenager in the time Matt just alluded to, the kind of less than zero, like drug kind of influence time. And yet, what I saw was everything I've looked at in my career amplified by social media. My first movie was about eating disorders. It was called Thin and it came out in 2006. And at that time, one in seven girls had an eating disorder. When I was doing an interview for social studies, one girl said, half my friends have eating disorders from TikTok and the other half are lying. I think what's changed is

• 18:30Speaker 06

  the triggers are so ubiquitous in the age of social media that it just amplifies everything that's already going on. I mean, of course, kids have always worried about fitting in, comparing themselves to other people. Are you in the popular group? Are you, you know, do you need to do certain things to be cool? But now they're comparing themselves against so many people, so much of the time, many of whom are not real. And the pressures are just really overwhelming. Like, when we did the Thin Project, one doctor said, biology makes the gun, society pulls the trigger. And that's just like, I think that what's

• 19:13Speaker 06

  changed is the 24/7 triggers and also a really kind of evilly engineered algorithm. You know, one thing I really took from some of Matt's work was the way that the algorithm is looking to take advantage of the fact that teenagers want social contact and want information and want something new.

• 19:35Speaker 05

  And can I connect that to a bit of science?

• 19:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  I don't think we're disagreeing about whether there's an issue. I think we're talking about the mechanism. And the place where I, I look at the science, which is what I do, is when you give people social media, some adolescents feel worse off and some feel better off. I think the question before us is, in what way is this stuff affecting young people? Lauren, I'd be curious what you'd say to this, but my impression is that that 24/7 tends to displace sleep, it tends to displace exercise, which lets people work through their emotions. It tends to displace in-person interaction, which helps us learn about each other's faces. But I'm not clear

• 20:21Speaker 05

  from the research that the mere act of using a device will lead to a problem. What's your read on that?

• 20:29Speaker 06

  I saw huge numbers of problems and that almost every kid said they would, if they had the choice, they would rather be in a world without it. That, I mean, of course, there are countervailing influences, like some people are going to have more self-esteem, or more support from their family, or other things that are gonna, or, or don't have the biology to have an eating disorder. But I found that even the kids who got something positive out of it, like Dominic, for example, was LGBTQ. He found affinity groups. He was politically active on there. He had a podcast. He used it in positive ways, but nevertheless, the

• 21:08Speaker 06

  bullying and the criticism of him about his body was worse than any positives he got. And I just feel like, you know, we kind of look at like, okay, we have this thing. Is it good? Is it bad? And I think, you know, of course, there are a lot of great things from technology that young people get. A lot of the kids in the show are makers and use it for their creativity. And eventually, it helps them find their voices, which I think proves to be a great antidote to this comparison culture. But, you know, it's, it's made to be addictive. And I think the other thing, you know, that I took from your work about novelty, it really connected me to what a lot of stories kids told about.

• 21:54Speaker 06

  Their loss of innocence, like Ivy talks about getting on Instagram and being really interested in baking and having all these pastel baking pictures on her feed and loving that. And then a picture comes up with a girl lifting up her shirt and showing her breasts, and she reads the comments of people commenting on that and starts to wonder what that is, the sexualization of women, and what would happen if she posted a picture. So I think, and when I had a show of this work and all the kids said, that happened to me. Like, I think there's a kind of new loss of innocence that every kid experiences.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Can I just say that there's one statistic that I found really telling that Smartphone Free Childhood, which is an organization that works out of the UK that's trying to encourage people to restrict smartphone usage for under 14s. There's one statistic that they used in their talk, which I found incredible, which is by our National Health Service, and it's, it says that in the last 10 years, outdoor accidents for young people have decreased by 70%. In that same time, incidences of self-harm have increased by 93%. And I do think that tells a story, that tells a scientific story of what these devices are doing.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  I, I just want to say, Jack, you're dead on it. We've seen an eclipsing of the physical by the emotional, but I, again, I want to add some larger context to this. Since the 1960s, the exploration of young people has happened increasingly in the internal space. For many years, it was, "Go west, young man," and the rest of that quote is, "Go yet west, young man, and grow up with your country." And when people, teenagers and adolescents, went outside, they got physical harm. We have been looking at, who are we? What is my sexuality? What is my identity? What is my gender? How do I fit in? Those questions are not new to the social media era, and the risks to the mental health are just the way they were to the physical health in a prior era.

• 23:56Kara Swisher?

  Certainly, but one of the things that Lauren mentions is that you wouldn't have known what you didn't know when you're on a telephone. It amplifies and weaponizes in a way. That wasn't possible before. So it's a different flavor of stuff.

• 24:07Speaker 05

  It is absolutely true. I'm just urging us to say that this is not a singular challenge that this generation faces. It is singular in that it's social media. But adolescents have been going through a difficult period for a number of decades for a bunch of reasons, which is why I'm going to come to this punchline. If we merely take the smartphone away, we will not get at what's challenging them. We need a bigger set of solutions.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  But how is it different from cigarettes, say, right? Cigarettes in the UK, we restrict the sale of cigarettes till sixteen. We're actually now phasing that so that children now will never be given the opportunity to legally smoke a cigarette. How are smartphones, these incredibly addictive devices that billionaires, billionaires have incentivized different groups to encourage people onto their systems and that their brains are fed by these systems? How is that not an addictive device that we can protect people from? And I hear you about, it goes back to Hamlet. It doesn't go back to the sixties. Do you know what I mean? You know, it goes back through time itself. But why can't we say, you know what?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  They've got incredibly plastic brains, as you, as you yourself say. They've got brains that are incredibly easily influenced by things. Why can't we say the best thing to do for them is to pull back this device from them until they have a slightly better understanding of themselves and can use it more safely? I'm not saying remove it completely from society. I'm saying just keep it back from the most, the most at risk from these addictive devices.

• 25:45Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 25:58Speaker 01

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• 26:43Kara Swisher?

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• 29:26Kara Swisher?

  And I can tell you from having sons, they talk about it. It's really quite a very different experience. And the long-term effect. Lauren, why don't you start?

• 29:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, even though the violence in adolescence is a very specific kind of fringe behavior, the thing that triggers it with the girl having nudes go around is completely common. Like, at one point in our discussion, I say, who's been sent a nude or who's sent a nude, and everybody's hand went up. I think, you know, one of the things we see with Sydney is the way it starts. Like, she gets on social, she starts to post pictures of her passion, which is photography. She gets no likes. Then she posts pictures of her in a bikini at the beach, all of a sudden she gets likes. So she's getting approval for doing that and then goes further and further, starts

• 30:18Speaker 06

  making thirst traps, starts having engagements with men she doesn't know, starts getting excited by the level of attention, the level of likes. They even talk about, well, Kim Kardashian did a sex tape. If I could have that many followers and that... Lifestyle, I would do that, too. So girls learn at an early age that showing their body and their sexuality is a way to get approval. And then the other thing I saw was just about, you know, kids being exposed to pornography super early, like third grade. Basically, once they get that phone or once they have a friend who has a phone, it's that gateway. And what they see there is super disturbing, like way beyond, you know, maybe like

• 31:01Speaker 06

  your grandfather's girly magazine or whatever people saw before.

• 31:05Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, or what stuff that we could get.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  There's violence against women. BDSM was a popular trend, which I confirmed, like even asking my own children if they were familiar with that. Even the young people in my office were familiar with that. Choking was a trend. One girl jokingly says, you know, I actually like BDSM, but it's kind of scary because teenagers don't know how to choke properly. So these are like very common, you know, things that pornography is the new sex ed. And I think that leads to a lot of performative kind of qualities on the part of girls. A lot of boys not knowing if they measure up.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  And again, like comparing, comparing against a totally unrealistic standard.

• 31:54Kara Swisher?

  I do remember the girl sent a picture like that to one of my sons. And I have to tell you, he was so confused and upset as a boy, right? Because of course you'd be like, oh, girl looking sexy kind of thing. But he didn't quite know, he was not at an age to know to do it. And it presented a real problem for me to talk to him about it. But talk about this.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  Coincidentally, I did a story for the Times called It's Time to Talk to Our Kids About Pornography. And what they're getting at is that we may have to think about what is known as a harm reduction strategy in the era we live in. It used to be, let's say that your kiddo got a magazine with some pictures in it. It didn't come across as instructional. It wasn't nearly so explicit, but to Lauren's point, once somebody gets a phone, young people are beginning to see this. And it may be that the antidote is what is called porn literacy. It's a really hard and difficult idea to get your head around as a parent, but it goes to directly what you were confronted with.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Do we have to tell our kids, this stuff's out there, you're likely to see it? It is very misleading. It is not a user's manual. Please talk to me or look up the fact that this is gravely misrepresentative. Cause it's going to be pretty hard for, to keep them from seeing it all together.

• 33:16Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's interesting. One of the things that we just talked about last night was my kids were looking at some, the kids were seven or eight and they seemed to have a phone. I don't know how. We were like, we have to start talking to our five year old about what she might see on someone else's phone. And now, and so you might see things that we didn't know it was on there. We didn't know if it was Paw Patrol or something worse. Race and racism is another issue. Matt, you write about peer pressure on a global scale for teens in Africa who are comparing themselves to Americans and Europeans. Lauren, the kids of color in social studies talk about social media favoring white, wealthy kids in the same way it leans into sex. And Jack, you said adolescence is focused on masculinity, not race and right when critics have called it anti-white propaganda.

• 33:59Kara Swisher?

  Elon Musk amplified that on Twitter. I'd like each of you to talk about it. Obviously it's absurd what he said, but Matt, start first talking about this peer pressure on a global scale.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, everyone is your neighborhood now. And I think once you compared yourself to everybody in middle school. And now it's possible to compare yourself well beyond that. Again, there are pros and cons to this. You can also communicate with people when you feel alienated. I, I think peer pressure. Is amplified tremendously, but I do not know that we can say that it is directly responsible for mental health challenges more than it was in the past. And I think to some extent, you can see it through the same lens that you look at the way people used to look at America through movies.

• 34:45Kara Swisher?

  Fair point.

• 34:45Speaker 05

  And say, that's what I want to be like. To some extent, it's really served a corporate function because it's created such uniformity around tastes.

• 34:54Kara Swisher?

  That they can then exploit that. Lauren, what about this idea of socially favoring white wealthy kids in the same way and how it impacts them? Did you anticipate that?

• 35:03Speaker 06

  No, I mean, I've looked at girls and body standards and beauty standards for a long time. And what I saw was that the comparison was just making everything worse and that a lot of the kids of color talked about the Caucasian beauty standard and how, and it's so quantifiable now because of your likes, that, you know, kids who are black and brown were trying to make themselves more Caucasian like to get likes, whether that was having less body hair or lightening skin. And there was a very real sense that a lot of the kids agreed about was that this kind of white beauty standard was the most popular.

• 35:46Speaker 06

  I think the other thing that's kind of new, though, is instead of it getting better for girls, it's gotten worse for boys. And boys talked a lot about, you know, the beauty standard, the racial one, but also the body one, the needing to have muscles. I've been looking at a lot of social about enhancements and steroids. I think it even came out in like the TikTok research by the 14 attorney generals that they, like TikTok itself, knew that more beautiful images were being favored. So I think it's pretty intentional.

• 36:18Kara Swisher?

  Jack, you talk about this idea of anti-white propaganda, your, your show, which I just, it's absurd to me, but I'd love you to address it.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  What happened was the show started to be more talked about, and then there was a movement against us.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  I don't know whether it was in any way constructed or whether it just happened organically. And the movement against us was that we had basically told the story of a specific case and then race swapped the character. And there was no discernible details from that case that seemed like we'd copied. It's just that once someone said it, then suddenly everyone was saying it and it went all over the internet. What concerned me was not, you know, Musk amplifying it because I wasn't so surprised by that. But I was surprised by Kimmy Badenoch, who's the leader of the opposition, saying that

• 37:19Speaker 04

  we'd done that. And it was one of those moments where you just go, it wasn't, oh, God, the right wing have taken over or the, you know, it was what's happening to our news in this country that that someone's consuming something as truth because they've been told it on social media. And when the person that's consuming it is the leader of the opposition, that that's surely really, really concerning.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Jack, can I just jump in on that? I think to my mind, you've hit arguably one of the most profound points is that information is so unreliable that it is leaving our young people not only overwhelmed, but really uncertain about what to trust and believe. And I guess my larger concern is even if we were to remove the smartphone for a few years, and I am an advocate for that, but even if we do for a few years, they will matriculate and graduate into a world that is filled with lies. And so I think where you see me going is not disagreeing with you guys that the smartphone is an issue. It is. I don't

• 38:27Speaker 05

  know how closely it's directly responsible for mental health, but I think we have to think bigger. We are raising kids in a very, very chaotic world. And how are we going to help them understand the information when so much of it is untrue?

• 38:43Speaker 06

  I totally agree with you. I mean, one of the things we did with the show was make an educational curriculum, and I think media literacy is the absolute most important thing, because it's also affecting all of our civic discourse and, of course, adults.

• 38:57Kara Swisher?

  And adults, that's the problem. Adults are addicted.

• 38:59Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 39:00Kara Swisher?

  So if adults are addicted, you know, it's a problem. Matt, you talked about the displacement effect, how, as you noted, screen time is a thief of sleep, exercise, in-person activity. Lauren, the kids you talked to missed how they're having deep conversations. And adolescence is all about being isolated in some way, especially between parents and kids, and not just kids who go to extremes. One of the things, the last episode of adolescence was about that. What do parents not know about what their kids are doing online, from your, each of your perspectives, and what we can do about that? I want to start with you, Jack, because that parent episode was sort of, the parents weren't understanding what was happening.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  What they thought was, they couldn't find a passion for Jamie to pursue, so they tried to help him, you know, get interested in football, get interested in judo, get interested in anything, get interested in drawing. And then he became passionate on the computer. And their thought was, well, this world is a world that's full of computers, and they weren't particularly computer users themselves, neither had jobs that were computer-heavy. And they thought, well, you know, this might be a way of him getting ahead, and so we're not going to challenge it. We're not going to encourage it either, we're just going to, we're just going to help him on his way. And if it is something that's interesting him and make him happy, then maybe that's a good thing. I've got to say, as a, as

• 40:23Speaker 04

  someone that's spent a long time thinking about it and researching it, I'm still really confused as to how to help. Elliot, my son, when Matt was talking about poor literacy, you know, at what age do I start trying to make him poor literate? And what Matt was talking about in terms of news, how do I guide him through, you know, when I was growing up, the BBC was the answer to everything, you know, that I, I grew up with, with the nine o'clock news and then the 10 o'clock news. And what it said on those news shows was what What was real and what was true and and now it, you know, we live in a world of quite dangerous nuance. And so, yeah, no, I'm deeply confused by it all.

• 41:03Kara Swisher?

  Lauren, why don't you go next and then Matt?

• 41:05Speaker 06

  I think one of the things our work has in common is identifying this huge generation gap. And I think parents don't have any idea what's going on. Like even there are so many cases, and this is why it was so important in our show to actually see the social media, where you'll see like Jordan and her mother right beside them, right next to each other on the couch at home. And mom is like doing work and shopping, super protective, doesn't let her like date. And meanwhile, Jordan is talking to boys all over the country and arranging a meetup that her mom doesn't know about. There are so many cases like that. Maren had a secret account where she would find her pro anorexia media. And and there was even a kid who took his own life, who told his mom two weeks before that there

• 41:50Speaker 06

  was a site where people were encouraging that. And she was conscious of it. She was right there and still powerless to stop it. So I think I've been really encouraging parents to watch this with their teenagers and talk about it. I can't tell you how many parents have said, I'm scared to watch. Like, parents like Sydney's mom in the first episode are like, I don't know if I want to know. Like, they really want to put their head in the sand. And I think kids in the show are just screaming for their parents and adults to support them with this. Like, they didn't create it. They need help navigating it. They were really eager to have the discussion. People are like, why did they share their

• 42:33Speaker 06

  phones? Why are they so honest? I think they're really eager to have the discussion and for adults to kind of do something to help them navigate this dangerous world. And I think we also all identified, like, Parents kind of keeping their kids at home for safety, like the safety fetish that's happened where you're worried, like if you go to the park, a predator will find you. And meanwhile, like not realizing there's so many more predators.

• 42:59Kara Swisher?

  Online. That is, I'm aware of that one. Matt?

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Jack, can I take a shot at answering your questions? This is how I think about it, and it's why I wrote How We Grow Up. I think the first thing we do is think about this in an inverse way. Rather than think about what we're going to keeping them off of, I think first we need to make sure our kids do the things we know keep them healthy. And that is a certain amount of in-person interaction, the sleep that they need, some exercise. After that, we're not going to be able to keep them off the devices. They are too ubiquitous, and we are modeling the behavior to the nth degree. The second thing is, Jack, when do we talk about this? I think of us as parents as the original form of social media. What we tell them at the dinner table, what we tell them when we drive in the car, is the original source of information they hear.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  And I think this is a chance to be reasonable with them, to understand this is a world they're matriculating to, and help them think through it in a way that doesn't make us sound hysterical. Because when we are totally fear-ridden, we're actually adding to that information overload. So get the good stuff done first, have reasonable talks with your kids.

• 44:13Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

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• 46:38Kara Swisher?

  There is a double edged sword that's related to this of being a place to build community. Online has been, and it's been a great place for a lot of people, but also fostering extremist or niche voices. Jack, this is clearly the central in adolescence. Lauren, one of the most interesting storylines in social studies was Nina and Ivy's family with their mom, Sherry. Talk about how social media impacted them. First, you, Jack, how you think about this idea of both building community and also fostering the negativity.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  In terms of building Jamie into a real character, when I was looking online, when I was talking to young people, the thing that interested me was not the big boys, if you like. I wasn't interested in Andrew Tate. The only people that talk about Andrew Tate in the show are adults, because he's shorthand for those adults to understand what's going on. What interested me was spending time looking for peers of Jamie. So people that were between thirteen to fifteen years old, who were talking about a game, or they were talking about a film, or they were talking about, you know, different things in their lives. And then they started talking about women.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  And that was the story that I was trying to build for Jamie, which is he is interested in lots of things. It's just that the overwhelming thing becomes for him because of how he's treated at school, because of the particular friendship group he's part of. He starts to become obsessed with the idea of being excluded. And I saw it happen to my own algorithm. The algorithm then fed that dissatisfaction until it became hate. And then the hate became overwhelming.

• 48:20Kara Swisher?

  Lauren?

• 48:21Speaker 06

  I think there is a limit to how great the affinity is on social media. I think it's such a performative space that real friendships are challenged. I mean, Ivy and Nina is a great example. Ivy was about seventeen, Nina was in her twenties. Nina did find community online, LGBTQ, trans acceptance for who she was that she didn't find at home. But she was a little bit older. She also had real friends that she had like developed over many years. She got together with those friends. Those friends were actually supportive. Whereas her younger sister Ivy, who had grown up on social media,

• 49:03Speaker 06

  really did not find connection to friends and ended up pulling herself out of school and preferring to be homeschooled because the friendships were so anxiety-producing. I mean, one of the things that the kids said in our show was they really loved the face-to-face contact without devices. And, you know, just going back to your comment about race. A lot of them went to the school that was very diverse and yet kids in it were very segregated into groups. And I think that the social media just kind of siloed those groups even more. And Keyshawn, who was black and from South Central, said that this group, he had such a bond with this group, it was like a diversity of kids that

• 49:48Speaker 06

  he didn't feel anywhere else. And when the kids watched the show, it was really interesting. I wanted it very diverse so everybody would kind of find themselves, but they didn't identify with the kid that was their race or their socioeconomic background. They identified with the kid that had their problem, their bullying, their slut shaming, whatever it was. So I definitely see the affinity, bond, and the political activism, and it's there, but it's so manipulatable. And I think the whole performative quality, you know, it has to be counterbalanced or it has to be enhanced by real world relationships. And I think that the kids of this generation, especially the ones who went through COVID, did not get that training.

• 50:32Kara Swisher?

  So Matt, toward the end of your book, you lay out a list of guidelines for parents and kids around smartphones. Pretty standard, no phones for bed or in the bedroom, taking breaks, setting time limits. My son bought himself a box and put his phone in it for hours at a time, which I think worked rather well, actually. Because, but it feels like this is your brain on drugs. Everybody knows it, and majority of Americans are not heeding the advice, including adults. Some of the people Lauren interviewed tried to go off social media and ended up going back on. Jack has suggested, as I have, if you have, government ban smartphones for children altogether or use of it. So what do you think about the guidelines, bans, restrictions? Because restrictions are always difficult. In France,

• 51:14Kara Swisher?

  they're having a hard time with age restrictions. They've talked about doing that here. Talk a little bit about the solutions and what works and doesn't work, or what you think will work.

• 51:23Speaker 05

  I think we've got to reframe this conversation so that we create the right incentives. I think community will come from in person, and that means putting some things first before you use the phone. But here's what I mean by incentives when you're on the phone. Let's reframe this for kids. I write a letter to them in this book called, essentially, don't let the technology industry own your shit, own your own shit.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  And part of it is letting them know what's actually happening so that they begin to take back some control of their own lives. The other thing I would think about is an idea called intermittent fasting for your device. We're not saying don't use it altogether. And in a prior book, A Deadly Wandering, which was about the science of attention, I get at this idea. It's actually kind of exhilarating, my kids, if you let your phone go for two hours and then see what comes up. The novelty is that much more exciting. I think we've got to change how we think about the relationship to a device that up to this point where the narrative says yes or no. It's not going to work.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  It's not healthy and it's not reflective of the world we're going in.

• 52:35Kara Swisher?

  Well, it's because you need it for work, you need it for a lot.

• 52:38Speaker 05

  You need it for everything and parents modeled this behavior. Let's, let's find some way to acknowledge who we are, what it is and what is the nature of our relationship together so that we can fix the tortured relationship between phone and human.

• 52:52Speaker 06

  You know what Matt was saying in terms of like times you're on and times you're off? The assumption is that we have to accept the way the tech companies are engaging with our kids right now. And I think, you know, Jonathan said it's our lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun. And the kids talk about how they can't go off. It's existential. If you go off, you don't exist socially. And of course, social life is deeply important for adolescents. So I think that we have to demand more from the tech companies, from the regulators, you know? Jack and I work in filmmaking and TV. We have so many regulations that we have to do before something goes on the air about what you can show, what you need to take out.

• 53:37Speaker 06

  What is the point of all these regulations for TV and movies and advertising when it's just a Wild West on social? And I think the advertising thing, I'm also really curious about Matt's look at the science because I thought that people were not allowed to use brain science in advertising. Like that was traditionally verboten. And now it seems like the algorithm is deeply connected to the most vulnerable parts of the teen brain and exploiting those.

• 54:12Kara Swisher?

  So in a way, talking about social media already feels on the verge of being outdated because of generative AI. Is there anything when you're thinking about AI going forward, especially when it comes to mental health and social media?

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that there's again a truth problem. I did a show about a care home during the pandemic, and there was a person that worked in the care home who got advice down the phone to prone a patient, which is means turn them on their front to make the breathing easier, for which I could produce lots of anecdotal evidence, but no medical evidence. And so I had to demonstrate medical evidence before I could put it in the show. Whereas I talked to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT will tell me as if it knows things that are wrong. So yeah, I think truth is going to be one of the biggest problems with AI.

• 55:05Speaker 05

  I'm glad you brought up AI because what it's proof of most of all to me is the quote unquote progress, or whatever you want to call it, is not stopping. And so I think we need, we need a really fundamental approach. And I like Lauren's point that just because you have the device doesn't mean you have to take everything that's on it. But and we need an approach that recognizes and teaches young people how to think about this environment that is not going to slow down. And, and to really put a fine point on AI in the grand scheme, it's probably going to take a lot of jobs, which is going to have a lot of even more direct impact on our young people's lives. We need a bigger framework than the

• 55:49Speaker 05

  one that says just to take away the phone.

• 55:53Kara Swisher?

  So my last question, each have done a lot of research and had conversation with kids and scientists and everything else. I'd love to know, lastly, what each of you were most surprised by in doing this? What is the thing that you had a preconceived notion, or something that you were like, oh, I didn't realize that? Let's start with you, Lauren, and then Matt, and then Jack.

• 56:15Speaker 06

  I was really surprised that kids didn't want it, that, you know, if they, if they could wave their wand. And get rid of it. They would rather. And what really shocked me was at the end of the series in episode five, when they said, what if we could have a space like this outside of here and just talk to each other? And I was shocked that that seemed out of reach for teenagers, just the idea of talking face to face.

• 56:43Kara Swisher?

  Matt?

• 56:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, the thing I'm most surprised by is I think we do have some answers. And I think those go to learning how to live in a world that is extremely chaotic and emotionally provocative. What I get into at the end of the book is there's a whole bunch of things young people can do when they are overwhelmed. And it leads up to things that not everybody can afford, like cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy. But I would suggest that if we give kids coping tools, they're going to be able to deal a little more favorably with a world that is going to be unyielding, hostile, and fast moving.

• 57:19Speaker 06

  I totally agree with Matt, but I also feel like we put so much responsibility on the kids. It's like blaming the opiate addict for the addiction.

• 57:27Kara Swisher?

  Exactly. That's what I was gonna say.

• 57:29Speaker 05

  Hard hardly. So hard. Sorry. I just want to make sure I'm really clear. Far from blaming them, this is the world they've inherited. And we've got to, we've got to give them some tools, tools that we need to internalize as parents as well. Because what you see happening in society is a lot of hostility, a lot of displacement, a lot of anger, and adults are mirroring that behavior.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  If it's a vulnerable kid with vulnerable parents who's going through a vulnerable education system, what you're talking about might be so far out of reach for them. Whereas at least denying technology for a little bit of time might make their lives a little bit more copable with for a little longer, so that when they then get the device, they can know how to cope.

• 58:13Speaker 05

  I don't disagree with that at all, Jack. I wholeheartedly agree.

• 58:16Kara Swisher?

  Matt, I'm gonna jump in. I think what they're saying to you is, you know, it's like being in a place where a toxic chemical company is spewing stuff and saying, what you really need to do is learn how to use oxygen masks.

• 58:28Speaker 06

  A gas mask, yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 05

  No, no, but but look, I'm not, I agree. We kept our phones away from our kids for a while. I think we're at slightly different. Vantage points in this conversation. There's a time we need to keep these away. And then there's a time we need to learn collectively how to understand what they are and make our own decisions about keeping them at arm's length. Because this world and the companies that seek our attention are not going to get any less easy to deal with.

• 58:56Speaker 06

  I feel like societally, we have to ask for more. It's like, you know, we're just now the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down. But like, I was so moved by hearing in the Jim Henson film about when Sesame Street was beginning, they brought together people who knew what kids loved with people who knew what kids needed. And I feel like the tech world doesn't have any, it's not guided by a kind of moral compass that's looking at what is good for kids. It's just, you know, what can we sell the most? And if the government won't step in, you know, we can demand that of brands who advertise.

• 59:34Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, so, all right, Jack.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  In terms of the research, what surprised me was how different the world was. I remember talking to a young girl. She was 14 or 15 years old. And she told me, I don't talk in class. And I haven't talked in class for two or three years. And I don't talk in class because there's a group of boys who intimidate me. And in each class, she was in a variety of different classes, there was a different group of boys. And the gender division seemed much more stark than when I was at school. And what it meant to be a boy or to be a girl seemed so much more problematic. Which isn't to say that there wasn't huge problems

• 1:00:17Speaker 04

  when I was a kid and that I wasn't a total mess. Just that something has been fed into this world, which has created quite serious damage.

• 1:00:27Kara Swisher?

  Okay, well, we're going to end on that. Thank you all so much. What an interesting and substantive conversation. And, you know, more to come, obviously, as this goes on. But I think the power of the tech companies, we all need to understand they are running things in ways they probably shouldn't be going forward, but doesn't mean they won't. Anyway, thanks to all of you.

• 1:00:45Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:00:46Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:00:51Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Megan Burney, Lissa Soap, Allison Rogers, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you know when to put down your phone. If not, put down your fucking phone. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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